How to Solve the I Hate My Job Problem

Fifty-five percent of employees are disengaged. Eight years ago, I got a
glimpse of how to solve this problem. It happened by accident.

A large pharmaceutical firm hired me and several other consultants to help
them better understand how to create great salespeople.

How they went about it was interesting. They gave each one of us several
dozen salespeople to study. They said, “We’ve given each of you a few top
salespeople, and we’ve also given you a bunch of other salespeople. But we’re
not going to tell you who is who. We want you to interview them, we want you to
follow them on sales calls, and then we want you to tell us who you think the
top ones are, and, very importantly, why you think they’re the top ones.

The pharmaceutical company hoped we might identify some ideas or tactics that
they weren’t seeing, things that all the salespeople could use.

Near the end of the study I worked with a sales rep in Phoenix. As she was
dropping me off at the airport, we had a few minutes, so I asked her a question
that I hadn’t asked anyone else, I said, “When you go on sales calls what do you
think about?”

I’ll never forget her answer. She said, “I always think about one particular
patient.” She said, “One day, I was standing in a doctor’s office waiting to
speak to him. I was there, wearing a name badge that had my company’s name on
it, so I stood out.”

“This lady in her 70’s came up to me and said, ‘Do you work for that drug
company?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ She said, “I just want to tell you that before I
took your drug, I couldn’t do anything. Now, because of your drug, I can get on
a plane, I can visit my grandkids, I can get down on the floor and play with
them. I just want to thank you for giving me my life back.”

“That grandmother,” she said, “she’s the reason I do my job. She’s my higher
purpose. When I have a tough day, and it’s a rainy Friday afternoon, the others
sales reps go home, I don’t. I do one more sales call because I might be able to
help one more grandmother like her.”

In that moment, I realized, we had been looking at the wrong thing. We had
been looking at single discrete behaviors. I realized, that thing I now call
Noble Purpose, the story in your head and the sense of meaning you attach to
your job, is actually what translates into hundreds of behaviors that produce
top performance.

I went back through the interview transcripts from the other reps looking for
places where purpose was evident. I saw it in the rep who said, “My father was a
doctor, and a doctor’s life is a lot harder than people think. So I just want to
make the doctors life easier.” Another rep said, “Science is such a passion of
mine, so I love to go into people’s offices and share science with them.”

All told, I found five representatives who seemed to be talking about
purpose. At the end of the study the pharmaceutical company leaders asked me,
“Who are the top salespeople in your group?” I said “These five.” I was 100%
right. And the Arizona woman who talked about giving the life back to the
grandmother was the #1 representative in the country.

Purpose drives profit, not the other way around. You don’t create purpose by
making a profit; you make a profit by establishing a Noble Purpose.

Maybe the reason 55% of people aren’t excited about their jobs is because we
haven’t given them anybody to get excited about.

Lisa Earle McLeod is a sales leadership consultant.
Companies like Apple, Kimberly-Clark and Pfizer hire her to help them create
passionate, purpose-driven sales forces. She the author of several books
including
Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That
Makes You Proud, a Wiley publication, released Nov. 15, 2012. She has appeared
on The Today Show, and has been featured in Forbes, Fortune and The Wall Street
Journal. She provides executive coaching sessions, strategy workshops, and
keynote speeches.